As all good fictional characters should, the people of Katherine Heiny’s debut short story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow, indulge in a lot of bad behavior. They sleep with their high school teachers and their married boyfriends and their girlfriends on the side. A lot of writers would use this behavior as an occasion for grand moral questioning, and Heiny’s creations tend to be perfectly aware of their failings. But they’re not exactly wringing their hands.

For the truth is, none of those titular adjectives applies in quite the way you expect. It’s more of a funhouse mirror effect. The carefree ones leave a wake of destruction behind them, the mellow ones leave their companions baffled by the remoteness of their ease. Ultimately, Heiny’s stories are less about being the actual human being who is freed from angst and fetters, and more about the effect of such creatures on the people around them. She is an expert on the baffled and titillated frustration of trying to deal with men and women who go through life so thoroughly untouched.

It’s no small trick to write with lightness and humor that nevertheless has an edge of tartness, but in story after story, Heiny does so with aplomb. Her work is sharp and refreshing, a parade of gin and tonics that somehow never get you drunker than that first expansive, thoughtful buzz. I chatted with her recently over email about going one step further, whether pajamas are an aid to the craft of writing, and the undeniable fact that rubbishy reality TV is really all about the relationships.

Michelle Wildgen: What are the subjects that obsess you, and why? What subjects have you deliberately or accidentally avoided, and why?

Katherine Heiny: If it’s about sex and relationships, I’m interested. I can watch the most rubbishy reality program with a laser-like focus because it’s all about interpersonal relations. But when it comes to politics or finance or foreign policy, that focus deserts me. Also I’m such a loser when it comes to writing suspense or action. I love writers who can do that—it’s a gift and I don’t have it.

MW: Your voice employs such a light, comic touch, even when you’re dealing with material that could easily feel dark—extramarital dalliances, the end of love, teacher-student affair in which the teacher seems less in control than the student—it feels tart and swift. What’s essential to the success of an approach like this?

KH: I think it’s really all about going one step further than necessary. I mean, it’s fine and factual to say something like “Her husband ran off with the hairdresser,” but if you add “and the hairdresser missed all her regular Wednesday clients,” then you’ve moved on from the heartbreak to the unexpected detail, and at that point, I’ll follow you anywhere. Humor, to me, is always about the unexpected. Anyone can tell you something shocking or tragic but how many people can add something surprising to it right at the end? Those are the people I want for my friends.

MW: What is your next literary challenge to yourself?

KH: I’m finishing a novel now and it’s so different from writing a short story. Writing a short story is like stopping somewhere unexpectedly for a drink—you’re in, you’re out and if you’re lucky you minimize the damage and hit a few high points along the way. But a novel is a more like some month-long family reunion—God knows what might happen. So much can go wrong.

MW: What is your best and most productive writing habit? Your least?

KH: I always sit down to write in the morning in my pajamas—if I get dressed, I might be tempted to go to the store or out for coffee. It doesn’t stop me from wasting time on Facebook, but it does keep me indoors. My least productive habit is probably getting all excited and making some crazy resolution, like, “I’m going to write 10 pages a day until my novel’s done!” It never works and then I feel guilty.

MW: Can you tell us about a craft problem you have dealt with successfully?

KH: Does getting out of bed in the morning count as a craft problem? Narrative is probably what I struggle with most; I really dislike writing backstory or exposition of any kind. Usually I solve this by dipping into a story once the relationship or conflict is already underway.

MW: When you read, what books or writers inspire you and why? How about non-literary sources of inspiration?

KH: I love Gone With the Wind so much that my oldest child’s middle name is Mitchell. I have read it a hundred times and always find something new to admire—Margaret Mitchell certainly didn’t struggle with narrative. Anne Tyler, Stephen King, Kate Atkinson, Nick Hornby, Daphne du Maurier . . . I’m always inspired by authors who write with such confidence.

Non-literary sources would definitely include my husband—he can do any accent in the world.

Katherine Heiny‘s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, and many other publications. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and children. Single, Carefree, Mellow is her first book.

Michelle Wildgen is a writer, editor, and teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition to being an executive editor at the literary journal Tin House, Michelle is the author of the novels Bread and Butter: A Novel, But Not For Long, and You’re Not You. You’re Not You has been adapted for film, starring Hilary Swank and Emmy Rossum.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38714/single-carefree-mellow-an-interview-with-katherine-heiny.html/feed0Good Humor, Good Music, Gigantic Themes: An Interview with Dimitry Elias Légerhttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38630/good-humor-good-music-gigantic-themes-an-interview-with-dimitry-elias-leger.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38630/good-humor-good-music-gigantic-themes-an-interview-with-dimitry-elias-leger.html#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 15:00:34 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=38630In his acclaimed debut novel God Loves Haiti, Dimitry Elias Léger stitches together history, sociology, religion, politics and a love triangle—all in the shadow of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The story revolves around the spirited artist Natasha Roberts, her husband the President, and the love of her life, Alain Destiné, a youthful savvy businessman who is determined to stay in Haiti. The book follows them before and after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010.

Lyrical and with a great sense of humor, in God Loves Haiti, Léger has created compassionate characters who navigate a natural disaster with fortitude, sensitivity and wit.

Léger was in Paris earlier this month for a reading at Shakespeare and Company to celebrate the publication of God Loves Haiti and I introduced him on a wintry Monday evening to a full house. The interview that follows was conducted by email after his reading and discussion at Shakespeare and Company.

Heather Hartley: What was the impetus for you to turn from journalism and nonfiction to writing a novel?

Dimitry Elias Léger: Legacy and money. I began thinking seriously about writing books the minute after my first child was born early in 2002. I wanted to leave him a tangible family heirloom, a cool paternal accomplishment to brag, something I wish I had when I was making my way into the world. It had to be my particular perspective on Haiti in book form, because such a novel could influence him in multiple ways. I knew that growing up in other countries he would learn about Haiti through depressing headlines. It would be impossible for him to know the delightful Haiti I knew and still know. I’d known I’d write books about the charms amid the tragedies of Haiti someday since I was 10. His birth gave me urgency. I had to stop putting it off. Finding the right voice for my stories about Haiti would take me most of the subsequent 10 years. I have two kids now. They both will learn about this country, one third of their patriotic identities, though my novel; they will also learn about me, my values, my sense of what is noble, humorous, and craven. Since they were old enough to see the odd hours I had to work to write the book, the stubbornness and persistence it took to ignore publishers’ rejections for many years until the right one came along, and the joy of successful publication and a popular book tour, the book will also forever serve as a message for them to follow their creative dreams and make the most of their talents in whatever fields they may have an aptitude for.

Money became a factor that added urgency to my turn to fiction. I left journalism in 2004 for grad school and a career in international relations abroad. I did it because I wanted to move to Europe and become a humanitarian, and also because I thought no longer doing high end and high-pressure journalism would mentally free me to turn to fiction as a serious hobby. I didn’t see the magazine industry crashing like it did, but it did. Once the Great Recession of ’08 stalled economic growth in Western Europe, where I’ve lived since ’05, and the job market here tightened considerably, leaving little room for non-natives and certainly non-Europeans, I had to look to generate income in a line of work other than writing reports and managing media relations for United Nations agencies in countries far from where my children were growing up. Taking a shot at literary fiction novels seemed as reasonable an option as seeking an advocacy job for a global NGO and corporation. My wife and I knew selling a first novel faced incredibly long odds. Yet I sold and published my first novel before finding a job. Go figure.

HH: What was it like to transform your writing from nonfiction to fiction?

DEL: It was an education. I had to unlearn most of the skills that made me a good nonfiction writer. I had to hunt for the qualities that made me love the novels I loved. Basically I had to find my voice as a musical novelist, and I had to develop a literary sense of humor, as the essential difference between nonfiction and great fiction is that the novelist has the right to be funny and profound while raising more questions than delivering answers. The transformation pretty much took a decade.

HH: The characters in God Loves Haiti come through vividly as they navigate as best they can inner conflict and outer chaos. Was it difficult to not have the earthquake overwhelm the story, and by extension, the individual stories of the characters Natasha, the President and Alain?

DEL: Nah, the disaster was no threat to overwhelm the story. I love war novels, and just about any novel about Haiti is a war novel. In fact the idea that risked overwhelming the novel was the word “Haiti.” It’s a disturbing word to many inside and outside the country. So the novel, as it features a president of Haiti, took on the word’s talismanic power head-on. I thought the questions of faith, the “God” part of the novel’s title, would provoke debate. Even I underestimated how much the brand Haiti can overwhelm conversations.

HH: You were an adviser to the United Nations disaster recovery operations in Haiti after the earthquake. How did this experience filter into God Loves Haiti? Was it hard to balance in your novel?

DEL: My personal experiences were easy to keep out of the novel. The story of the sensitive writer who is overwhelmed by the sight of human suffering on a national scale is a cliché I didn’t want to add to. My experience with the UN did allow me intimate access to the upper-reaches of the Haitian government and the power dynamics with the international community. I was a public affairs officer. My job was to constantly visit and assess how well the UN’s programs were doing and report back to UN brass, colleagues, and the press. Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, the 2014 National Book Award-winning collection of war stories, had the same job for the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq at the height of those . . . interventions. Our fiction is similarly harrowing, except for the difference that I tell the story mostly from the emotional perspective of locals, and he writes from the perspective of the Americans.

HH: The structure of God Loves Haiti follows the characters as they experience the earthquake at different points and it’s so tied to their stories. How did you go about creating this structure?

DEL: I simply wanted to write about the emotional turmoil of experiencing an earthquake. It’s unlike any other natural disaster. I wanted readers from every walk of life to have their hearts spin as the millions of people who experience earthquakes have.

HH: Stitched into the story of God Loves Haiti are expressions in French, and excerpts from Dante, and the novel begins with Derek Walcott’s stunning poem, “A City’s Death by Fire.” How does poetry influence your work? Is there something that you find in poetry that is expressed more readily or differently than in prose?

DEL: My novel tries to build on the long tradition of writers who wrote about peoples of faith dealing with overwhelming personal circumstances. That meant Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat and José Saramago, but it also ended up meaning lots of poets like Dante, Walcott, and Michael Ondaatje. Poetry, and the humor in much of the great Latin novels, were the fuel for my voice. You are what you read, but you really are what your writing talent says you are. Dry, economical prose was a gene my writing wasn’t born with, even though I love Hemingway and Camus to death.

HH: There’s a great sense of wit in God Loves Haiti. Does humor come naturally to you?

DEL: Thanks, and, um, yes. When I told an old friend that looking for the funny in each situation was making writing a novel more fun than I expected, he said, wait, but you’re not funny. I laughed! He probably was right. But humor came to me naturally while writing fiction. It entertained me and made me want to entertain readers. Humor proved the great difference between fiction and nonfiction writing to me. I do believe a novel has to entertain, no matter the subject matter.

HH: How do you balance the reality and the myth of Haiti in your writing?

DEL: Like I balance being me, the man/father/husband, and being a writer/artist: I don’t. What’s reality to a writer aka mythmaker anyway? What’s the difference who we are in private and who we are when we make eye contact with another human being who we instinctively want to like us? My guess is, the reality and myth of Haiti is my favorite subject, it’s my DNA. Balancing it is not a worry. Balance is the enemy of entertaining art and literature.

HH: What are the ingredients of a good story for you?

DEL: Good humor, good music, gigantic themes i.e. life and death, honor and disgrace and sex risks. The rest is noise.

Dimitry Elias Léger was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Educated at St. John’s University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he is a former staff writer at the Miami Herald, Fortune magazine, and the Source magazine, and also a contributor to the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Face magazine in the UK. In 2010 he worked as an adviser to the United Nations’ disaster recovery operations in Haiti after the earthquake. He lives with his family in France and the United States.

Heather Hartley is Paris editor at Tin House and the author of Knock Knock and Adult Swim (forthcoming), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems, essays, and interviews have appeared in or on PBS NewsHour, The Guardian, and The Literary Review, among others. She has presented writers at Shakespeare & Company Bookshop’s weekly reading series and lives in Paris.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38630/good-humor-good-music-gigantic-themes-an-interview-with-dimitry-elias-leger.html/feed0Nobody is Ever Missing: An Interview with Catherine Laceyhttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38589/nobody-is-ever-missing-an-interview-with-catherine-lacey.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38589/nobody-is-ever-missing-an-interview-with-catherine-lacey.html#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 15:00:05 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=38589What does it take to leave everything in your life behind? To dream of a future unencumbered by the past because you have abandoned your past and all the people in it?

Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing follows a young woman named Elyria as she hitchhikes through New Zealand after leaving her family in New York without warning. Her past, however, proves to be impossible to escape and much of the novel exists in the fever dream state of Elyria’s rememberings as she thinks back on the unraveling of her marriage and her sister’s suicide.

To say that Lacey’s novel is one of the most entrancing novels I have ever read would be an understatement. It took only a handful of pages to convince me that I would follow Catherine Lacey wherever she led me—there are some writers whose instincts are so clearly on point that one inherently trusts them to make the right choices. Lacey’s prose has an obsessive quality about it that builds with an unstoppable momentum and results in a lyrical and haunting meditation on loss and displacement. Nobody Is Ever Missing is the ellipses on the question of “What if…?” and the work of a talented new voice.

I met Catherine in December at a reading she did for Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco and was impressed by her reflective insights on writing and literature as well as her thoughts on the difficulties and possibilities of making a living as an artist.

Emily Ballaine: You have an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia. What led you to write a novel instead of a nonfiction piece? Is your approach to writing fiction different from your approach to writing nonfiction?

Catherine Lacey: I made the often-unadvised choice of starting an MFA straight out of undergraduate, during which I had written a short collection of essays for my thesis. I was pretty sure I needed more training to become a better critic and essayist, that it wasn’t the sort of thing I could do alone. I was writing fiction as well, but I was more private about it and I thought any improvement there would only come from solitude and I think that was somewhat true for me. At Columbia I took a fair amount of fiction seminars, which were hugely impactful, more than I even realized at the time because I was so focused on writing nonfiction. I spent about four years working on a book there that just didn’t hang together. Around the same time I realized that book didn’t work, I started writing the series of stories that became Nobody Is Ever Missing.

As far as approach, my fiction seems to come from an untamable, uncooperative place in the brain, while the process of writing nonfiction is more above board and straightforward. I will edit an essay with just about any editor I happen to be working with, but I only share unfinished fiction with a select few.

EB: That’s interesting you find writing fiction a more private act than nonfiction. What is it about writing fiction that makes it more difficult to share, at least initially?

CL: With nonfiction the goal is so much more specific. I usually have a specific idea I want to get across or a story to tell that has already happened. The idea is either clear or its not. The artistry that goes into turning a piece of writing into something more like a piece of art is still there, but the underlying goal of the piece is there regardless. In fiction I tend to not know what I’m writing about until I’m nearly done and sometimes I still can’t articulate it. I don’t want anyone in on it until I am sure I innately know what direction I’m trying to lead it.

EB: There seems to be an assumption many people jump to that first person novels (especially if they are about women and written by women) must actually be some sort of insidious, undercover form of nonfiction. Did this change the way you approached writing Nobody Is Ever Missing? Does this assumption that you are actually your character make it difficult to write a character who can, at times, be somewhat difficult and unlikeable?

CL: Thankfully this sort of self-awareness didn’t shape the way I was writing, at least not to my knowledge. There was one reporter who seemed intent to conflate me with Elyria and I wrote a rant-y essay about it for Buzzfeed Books, but other than that I think I’ve more or less escaped accusations of autobiography.

That said, I’m starting to discover that my method for building a first person voice is a mix of theater and surrogacy. A new voice generally starts sounding close to my own voice, but as it continues to develop all these foreign parts get mixed in until it feels like something outside of me. At that point I try to inhabit that character as if she or he is a character in a script that I’ve been cast to play. And isn’t it always more fun to play a jerk or freak instead of a basically well-behaved nice person?

EB: Always! Well-behaved people rarely make for particularly interesting stories which is why it surprises me when some people will criticize a book because the character isn’t someone they want to hang out with. I liked what Claire Messud said in an interview a couple years ago: “The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?’”

CL: Yep. Today someone on Twitter asked me, “How do you live with yourself?” At first I thought he was just being mean, but it turns out he was a fan of the book, he was just generally curious if my brain worked the same way as Elyria’s brain. I wrote a book about a person who would never write a book and non-insane people still think she’s me. No one is safe.

EB: The sentences in Nobody Is Ever Missing have a very lyrical, almost rambling (in the best possible way) quality about them that pulls the reader into Elyria’s head. Did you find that you were writing in a style that felt familiar to you, or did the evolution of the character shape the structure of the story?

CL: She took about a year before her voice became clear to me, then it became a lot easier to write. I think the first time I felt like I had figured out who she was beyond just the basic facts of her life was in one of the chapters where she is speaking directly to her husband and going on rant about penguins and dogs and babies that is both logical and illogical. You know, maybe that’s it. Everyone has their own personal way of being simultaneously logical and illogical. Understanding your characters is a search for those points of illogical logic.

Photo by Lauren Volo

EB: Elyria spends a lot of time alone and except for in the flashback scenes the only interactions we witness her having with other people are interactions with strangers. As I was reading I couldn’t help but feel like I was waiting for one of these people to do something terrible to her and was rather (pleasantly) surprised when they did not. Is that an assumption you thought readers might have? Is there something inherently loaded in this idea of a woman alone?

CL: The fact that readers would fear for Elyria’s safety isn’t something that really crossed my mind while I was writing it. I have always loved traveling alone and I did actually hitchhike in New Zealand, which I always considered more efficient than risky, despite the fact that a lot of the women who picked me up told me I was being insane and dangerous. The men who I hitchhiked with were half as likely to warn me of this. I believe there is nothing inherently loaded about a woman traveling alone. The accepted lie that women shouldn’t travel alone is much more loaded to me. Human beings tend to live up to the narratives around them. If you grow up being told there’s a whole list of things you can’t do, you are likely to cave in and start adding to that list.

EB: Escape is clearly a big theme in this book and the fact that Elyria actually acts on her desire to run away leaves the reader feeling both in awe of her and also a little frightened for her. What is it about this idea of disappearing that resonated with you?

CL: One thing that disappearance or isolation or solitude can be about is trying to discover who you are without the context of other people. Artists and writers either have this sense of estrangement built-in or they have to find a way to get it. The paradox is that the product of your isolation—your art or stories—are a form of connection with other people on some level, or a way for people to connect with each other. So, the tension between isolation and connection is something that kept coming up while I was writing—how much can I do alone, how much do I need other people, how much do other people need me to be around and for what purpose? Elyria isn’t an artist, so her way of looking at this is different, but I suppose I was drawn to her story because of the way it parallels being a writer who also wants to be a connected, kind human.

EB: We do seem to have a cultural tendency to typecast artists as these solitary geniuses, but you’re right, the reality of creating art is finding that balance between independence and interdependence. You wrote Nobody Is Ever Missing while living and working at a collectively owned and operated bed and breakfast. Did this type of communal atmosphere change the way you look at or make art?

CL: It certainly taught me a lot of things about communicating with people and building friendships that can handle the stresses of running a business together and I learned a lot of it by failing, which really is also how you learn how to write. Overall it probably didn’t have as direct of an effect on me as the specific people did but I don’t know how I would measure or describe that effect. Massive and imperceptible at the same time.

Catherine Lacey is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). It was released in the UK, New Zealand and Australia by Granta Books; a French translation is forthcoming from Actes Sud. Her short fiction and essays have been published widely. She was named a Granta New Voice in 2014 and awarded an Artist’s Fellowship from NYFA in 2012. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Columbia Univeristy. Her forthcoming novel is titled, The End of Uncertainty.

Emily Ballaine is a writer and a bookseller at Green Apple Books on the Park. She lives in San Francisco.

The novel tracks a fatal, memory-erasing epidemic that plagues the country, and the sinister hospital where—so it is being promised—a cure is in development. We follow Joy, Van den Berg’s protagonist, through this uncanny landscape, and a reader couldn’t ask for a better, more compelling guide: she is equal parts frightened and confident, jaded and hopeful, resigned and mutinous. And this is Laura van den Berg’s great strength: capturing with envy-inducing precision the fraught and fragile duality of human experience and connection. Her characters—like so many of us, like maybe all of us—often find themselves caught in Chinese finger traps, often of their own making, and it is something special on the page to watch as Laura van den Berg examines the ways in which they pull at the warp and weft.

This interview was conducted over email with Laura, whose brain should be studied.

Vincent Scarpa: You are—whether or not modesty prevents you from copping to it—a master of craft when it comes to the short story. This is an opinion shared by most everyone I talk to who has read the stories in Isle of Youth and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. I genuinely have yet to find a single detractor.I came to know your work—and then came to know you, after sending an embarrassing fan letter in high school—through your story “Where We Must Be,”and have remained utterly dropped-jaw ever since when I read you. I bring up that story in particular because it seems the best example of something you do so well in the short story, and something that’s incredibly difficult to pull off, which is striking the exact right balance between the A-story and the B-story, and making that juxtaposition a deeply resonant one for the reader. “Where We Must Be”is just one of many of your stories that function structurally in this way, but this is also a sweet spot that seems primarily reserved for the short form—the limits the form imposes are conducive to that kind of meaningful juggling. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the transition then from working with twenty-five pages or so of space into writing a novel like Find Me. What impulses that you may have felt in working on short fiction did you find yourself having to work against here? What literary muscles needed to be retrained, what tricks or methods abandoned?

Laura van den Berg: I’m not going to lie: it was a tough transition. I wrote the first draft of the novel in 2008 and approached it in exactly the same way I would when drafting a short story: wrote it all the way through, in a big rush, said yes to everything, no matter how ill-advised, jumped off every cliff, totaled every car, etc. In years past, did Find Me contain A. a subplot about a drug-dealing televangelist, B. a subplot about teleportation conspiracy theories, C. subplot about mind control, or D. all of the above?

All of the above, Vincent. All of the above.

As it turned out, having a 300-page disaster on your hands was very different than a 25-page disaster. Not long after I finished the first draft of Find Me, I had my first collection of stories come out and moved to rural Pennsylvania and was trying to negotiate a difficult period in my family life and my first full-time teaching job and relationships that mattered to me—you know, living. That slowed my progress for a while and then it took me a while longer to face my hideously messy draft, to understand what I’d done and how I might break from it, and then there was an even longer cycle of re-writing and starting over, re-writing and starting over. It was very hard to not be finishing anything for long stretches, that constant state of suspension, which was part of the reason why I started writing stories along the way and ended up with Isle.

Process-wise, the biggest thing I had to move away from was the incremental approach. If I am really into a story I’m working on, I could write a scene while holed up in the bathroom of a raging party—in fact, I have done just that. I could write another scene in the morning with coffee, another in my office at school, and so on, and all those little bits of time can actually add up to something worthwhile. With my novel, I found that ultimately I couldn’t work incrementally, in the midst of daily life, or else I was just going to keep repainting a house that needed to be set on fire and bulldozed. A novel wants your life, in a way—at the risk of sounding melodramatic—and so consequently a lot of the most important work was done at residences, when it could have my life for a set period of time, or during stretches at home where I could lock myself in a room for many hours.

So it was hard, but I don’t mean to make it sound like drudgery—it wasn’t at all. I’m not inclined toward drudgery, so if it was a slog, I would have given up on the book years ago, for I am not a very good slogger. The hard part was mainly psychological: how to keep the faith, how to not let doubt erode the project, how to ask the right questions, how to see with greater depth and clarity. To come through the other side of that, to get to have a lengthy and intense relationship with a project, is richly rewarding and…kind of addictive? In the midst of the toughest patches, there were times when I thought, Goddamn, I’ll never write another novel again, and now what am I working on? Yep.

VS: For many short story writers—or, at least, for this one—what’s frightening about the prospect of a novel is the necessity of unlearning the impulse to always be closing. You and I both had the gift of studying with Pamela Painter—the unofficial queen of the short-short—and she’s very much a writer and teacher who encourages this idea of always having the end in sight. I’ve found that tremendously helpful in writing stories, but I imagine that ideology sort of needs to be jettisoned when working on a 270-page novel, no? You must be willing to write with the purpose of opening up more avenues, more possibilities, rather than being in the mindset of getting from the first sentence to the last. And, perhaps most obviously, you have to convince yourself as the writer that your potential reader will be both willing and wanting to follow your lead for a much longer time. Having gotten to the other side of this obstacle now, I’d be curious to know how you’re approaching stories, if you’ve returned to them. What, in terms of craft, has revealed itself as true or mostly true in working on both the short and long level?

LvdB: I do remember Pam talking about having an end in sight—and I often feel that with short stories. I might not know how it ends, but maybe there is an image or some kind of vague point on the horizon I sense I’m writing towards. And I tried to hold on to that with the novel, but ultimately had to embrace letting go—of not knowing the ending or even the next chapter or turning point. I had a two- or three-year stretch where I would think (and, ugh, say) periodically, “I’ve got it! I’ve figured it out! I’m almost done!”and that feeling would always turn out to be illusory, a mirage in the desert, until one day it wasn’t, but by then I had at least started saying those things aloud. If you’re working on a novel, whatever you do, don’t say, “I am almost finished with my novel.”It’s worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways—that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me. Since I was working on stories, on and off, while I was writing Find Me, it didn’t feel strange to return to the shorter form. The story is my first love and though I’m working on a new novel project now, I’m also working on stories; the story-novel rhythm seems to be a good one for me. There’s an Aimee Bender quote that I think of often and it goes: “Write what you feel like writing each day…it sounds so basic, but there’s something radical in it, and it has helped me many, many times.” I love this sentiment, and working on stories and a novel at the same time helps me from feeling too “trapped” in a project. And I love that sense of expanding possibilities in the story form, too. So perhaps the concept isn’t so different, but it’s just that the scale is more compressed.

VS:Find Me is a novel concerned with many things, but primarily it is asking questions and seeking answers about memory: its malleability, its relationship to abandonment, and the ways in which it comes to calibrate our lives. Joy, your unforgettable narrator [accidental pun!], has this to say: “A theory on why we stop remembering: there is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell ourselves and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.”I found that passage so moving. It’s such an elegant thesis about the pursuit of willful amnesia as a kind of survival skill, as well an astute commentary on how our memories—be they accurate or not, if memory can even be said to be evaluated in terms of accuracy—often irritate our attempts at self-narrativizing. What about these concepts compelled you toward a novel about a fatal, memory-erasing epidemic—told in the first person, no less! How did you wrangle such a limitless area of inquiry into what Find Me contains?

LvdB: To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. It’s that Joan Didion chestnut:“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But to what extent are our memories objectively “real”and to what extent are they influenced by our self-narrativizing? That can be a tough question to parse. In any case, this is an area that interests me enormously and that accounts for my draw to the first person, I think. Even a reasonably reliable first person narrator is still engaged in self-narrativizing. Jim Shepard, by the way, is brilliant on this, both in his first person stories and in his lectures/writing on craft.

In my teens, I went through a very bad mental health patch and found myself in a therapy group made up of young women, some of whom had endured truly horrific childhood traumas. In some cases, these women had the sense that something terrible had happened to them, but key details were repressed. This struggle was not my struggle—I had my problems, but my parents loved me, I had never been abused, I did not have vast stretches of missing time—and yet I will never forget witnessing that battle occurring within these women, being desperate to remember and also being terrified to face what their memories might be holding. Not remembering was killing them, but remembering might kill them, too.

So the divided self was always the draw. Certainly I was aware of the larger echoes of self-narrativizing and collective amnesia on both a national and global stage—I wrote the first draft of this novel on the heels of the Bush years—and for a while, there were threads that tried, not very successfully, to speak to the cultural amnesia more explicitly, but ultimately the book found itself when those threads fell away and I just fully embraced Joy’s interior journey.

VS: The ideas regarding memory that the novel presents are further complicated when Nelson, a man Joy finds on the road while seeking her mother, makes an interesting distinction between the human and the animal, saying, “…what separates us from animals is not logical thought but our ability to set our own traps.”In what ways do you see Joy as setting her own traps in the novel? And, in a broader sense, in what way do we as humans do this? It’s an unnerving observation in how dead-on it feels, how precisely it is delivered.

LvdB: I think we’re often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself. When we do things that are bad for us, we’re often keenly aware of a destructive impulse playing out. Joy feels “less than”and thus has a tendency to end up in situations where her power has been ceded to another figure. The novel tracks her gradual, flawed fight for autonomy.

VS: On a craft level, I really loved the way lists function in the novel. Joy makes lists habitually, willing herself to remember things both painful and banal. This move does double-duty, in the sense that the lists are of course resonant in a context wherein so much is being forgotten, but they also provide an opportunity for the reader to see Joy as setting her own traps, in that these lists limit, they self-synopsize, they purport to be in and of themselves wholes. Or are they holes? When she’s listing, the reader has a chance to see the way in which Joy is comforted by distillation, by tailoring. How do you see the lists functioning formally in the novel, and was that an organic maneuver in drafting?

LvdB: Oh, I’m so glad you asked about the lists! They were fun to write. They started as a way for me to understand Joy’s character and the world at large, and I believe it was my editor who suggested they take on a fuller role. I think they’re definitely a way Joy organizes her understanding of her environment, which is often bewildering, but it also shows the limits of her understanding. She can list facts about Kansas, for example, but is that the same as knowing what Kansas really is as a place? She can list the chronology of her childhood and the rules of the hospital, but what exists in the gaps? So I do think they are holes, in that way; they hit on that distinction between information and a deeper kind of knowledge.

VS: Joy observes that, “to look inside yourself and see so much mystery is the worst kind of loneliness.”Reading that the first time, I felt the distinct pang in the abdomen I associate with your work, while also thinking, yes, of course, it is the worst kind of loneliness, but it is the best kind of fiction. Characters who share Joy’s sentiment are, to me, the most fascinating characters. Now having three books under your belt, there are some themes and abstractions which obviously preoccupy you, one of which is this idea of our own unknowability. That you frequently explore this in the first person is stunning to me, and a testament to your ambition and strength on the sentence level. Perhaps it’s a lofty and impossible question, but I’d love to hear you talk just a bit about why you feel magnetized toward this area? What about it continues to be generative for you in your work, perhaps even in your life?

LvdB: Why Vincent, I love causing people a “distinct pang in the abdomen.”Thank you!

Unknowability—I’m obsessed with it, obviously. I’m not in a therapy group any more, so now all my anxieties are appearing in my fiction. So much is unknowable, of course: the inner lives of those around us, our most hidden impulses and capacities, what will happen an hour from now, what will happen after we die. If I keep up this Joy-esque list, I might have an existential meltdown right here at my desk.

So here is a different list. Here are some of the things I think we want most in life: to, with as much clarity as possible, understand where we came from and what that history means; to understand who we are; to be known; to feel free. That might sound like a simple list, but I believe all four of those things are incredibly difficult to achieve—especially since it’s hard to feel truly known if you don’t understand yourself and your history. These things have to be fought for, oftentimes. Joy deeply wants all of those things and they are deeply inaccessible to her, and the fight to make them accessible is, for me, the central story. Maybe I’ll end up being the kind of writer who keeps trying to find different ways to look at a similar emotional landscape? A lot of my favorites are those kinds of writers, so I could do worse.

Laura van den Berg’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank OConnor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories, The Isle of Youth (published by FSG Originals in 2013), received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Find Me is her first novel. She lives in the Boston area.

Vincent Scarpa is a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas and managing editor of The Austin Review.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38439/a-novel-wants-your-life-an-interview-with-laura-van-den-berg.html/feed2Watching the Detectives: An Interview with Matt Burgesshttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38534/watching-the-detectives-an-interview-with-matt-burgess.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38534/watching-the-detectives-an-interview-with-matt-burgess.html#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 15:00:55 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=38534Matt Burgess’s second novel Uncle Janice is set in Queens and tells the story of Janice Itwaru, a young undercover drug officer in the NYPD trying to make detective. As with his first book Dogfight, Burgess’s new novel is populated—stuffed, in the best possible way—with cops and drug-dealers, characters trying to get a leg up, to make it through the day intact, and, with luck, a little ahead of things. This is a sharp book about crime and policing, sure, but like all great literary crime books its real concern is the neighborhood, and one of the things I loved most about this book was the way that Matt brought Queens, that irreducible borough, to the page.

Fill disclosure: Matt and I have known each other for years, so you may not believe me when I tell you that it’s one of the best books I’ve read, and particularly timely. But maybe you’d believe Charles Bock, who said:

“Uncle Janice is that mythical sixth season of The Wire for which we have all been pining. Yeah, that good. The daily trials and tribulations of one Janice Itwaru—undercover drug officer, fallen daughter, all around wrong way gal—make for that rarest of reading experiences: at once comic and enthralling, always surprising, and unexpectedly touching. The eye, ear, voice and heart of this novel are bulletproof. Whoever the hell Matt Burgess is, dude does not sleep for one sentence. Neither will you.”

Whoever the hell Matt Burgess is! I love that.

Well, I know who he is, and I knew where to find him, and this interview was conducted over email while he was on the road, when neither of us was sleeping (he: worrying over sentences; me: worrying over an 8 month old).

Ethan Rutherford: First off, congratulations on Uncle Janice. I thought it was a terrific book, and though I hesitate to call it timely, to a certain degree, it is: things between the NYPD and the community it’s intended to serve are incredibly tense right now. And here’s a book about a young New York City cop, working undercover narcotics in Queens, under a lot of pressure to make drug-buys and survive long enough to make detective. The story very much belongs to Janice—and if it is interested in the issues of policing, it’s all filtered through her—but the book is set in 2008, in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting, which was another crisis point for the NYPD. Can you talk a little about how you came to set the book in the time/place you did? I’d also be interested in hearing what you think fiction can bring to these issues that, say, other media cannot.

Matt Burgess: Well, the book is set in Queens because I grew up there and I can’t yet seem to get myself to daydream about anywhere else. Stoops, park benches, pool halls, alleyways: they’re these charged spaces for me. I grew up telling and listening to stories, and it’s almost impossible for me to segue to fictional storytelling as a novelist without taking those places with me. When I was last in Queens, a couple weeks ago to promote the book, my friend Timmy was walking down a crowded sidewalk and there’s this woman coming from the opposite direction, talking to herself, and he accidentally makes eye contact with her, and when he does, she punches him in the stomach. She kept walking, everyone around him kept walking, and after a brief moment of confusion he kept walking too. What’s he going to do? Say something to her? Escalate it? Instead, later that night after work, he goes to the bar and tells us about it. That’s what we do. We try to cope with all this craziness by turning it into stories, and that’s what my books are trying to do.

But why 2008? I’m not quite sure. My previous book was set in the recent past as well, and it’s something the Coen Bros. frequently do in their movies (The Big Lebowski, which came out in 1998, takes place during the first gulf war.) I write blindly, in longhand, in black-and-white composition books, without any idea of where I’m going plot-wise; I think setting the book in a precise historical moment at least gives me something to hold onto. I don’t know what the characters are going to do on a particular day, but I do know what tabloid headlines they might be talking about. Plus, 2008 was particularly bananas for New York: the economic crisis, the governor sleeping with hookers, the Sean Bell trial, the Giants winning the Super Bowl. The nice/tragic thing about writing an NYPD novel, though, is that you can set it in any year and you’ll probably be addressing some controversial catastrophe.

Specifically what fiction can bring to these issues is nuance. For both writer and readers the novel is an exercise in empathy, something these debates could use a lot more of.

ER: How much research went into this? The rumpus, the housing projects, the streets? How’d you pull these threads together?

MB: I’m going to borrow a line from one of my heroes, the novelist George Pelecanos, and say, “the most valuable research I do comes from just hanging out in the neighborhoods and listening.” I was talking to a friend mine who’s an undercover cop and I asked him what was the scariest part of his job. I’m expecting him to say getting shot at. Instead he tells me he’s constantly worried that his bosses might try to screw him over. Working the streets was less stressful than navigating office politics. That was a revelation for me. It’s hard for a lot of us to relate to police officers, but my friend’s most chronic problems—how do I navigate this massive bureaucracy while retaining some sense of self?—were things almost anyone can relate to, in the same way you don’t have to be a veteran of war to appreciate Catch-22. The germ of Uncle Janice came out of that barroom conversation. From there, the research took me to more hanging out: with dealers, with addicts, walking around the Queensbridge Houses, showing up at the Queens Narcotics Division, getting kicked out of the Queens Narcotics Division, and really just listening, without any sort of agenda.

ER: So how do you know when you’ve got the story? How do you know when to stop?

MB: I don’t know! I’ve got the story when heading to my desk every morning becomes a compulsion. I stop—and I stole this from a Raymond Carver essay—when I’m putting commas back in the same places where I’d taken them out on the previous revision.

ER: Janice is such a great character—full, complicated, funny—and in some ways such an unlikely protagonist. In crime fiction, we’re so used to seeing sort of lone-wolf investigators: men—almost always men—who are on the outs with their family and friends, hard-drinking and brawling loudmouths who cause trouble, who flaunt the law rather than being bound by it, etc. (this is a ridiculously simple take, I know). But Janice is young, and the mistakes she does make come from inexperience, or a very understandable ambition. She’s not jaded; she’s kind-hearted. She’s juggling a lot—taking care of her mother, who has early onset dementia; she’s thinking about her love life—and trying hard to make it through the day. How did she come to you, as a character?

MB: I am so happy that she comes across that way to you. Before I knew her name or anything else about her, I had her job. That was first. I wanted to write about undercovers. Statistically speaking most undercovers are people of color. Because it’s a fast track to detective—if you last 18 months in Narcotics without getting killed or sent back to patrol, you automatically get your gold shield—most undercovers are also young and ambitious, without any of the internal connections that might get them promoted via a less dangerous route. So I knew those things about her: young, ambitious, a person of color, in this case Guyanese, because I thought that was a culture that has been underrepresented in fiction about New York. And I say “her” even though in the first few months of writing this book the protagonist was a man. I made the switch after realizing a female character might face particularly difficult challenges working her way through the male-dominant culture of the NYPD. That’s how character construction tends to work for me. I start with a job, a vague idea of a person, and then I put them under as much pressure as possible. Chase them up into a tree and throw rocks at them to see what they’re made of. And it turns out Janice is made of some pretty strong stuff.

ER: Every undercover we meet is a great story-teller, eager to highjack the conversation, to steer it wherever he/she might want it to go (it’s one of the great pleasures of this book, the way that other voices intrude on the narrative). Here’s her partner Tevis: “Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, they don’t’ see the world closely like we do. We’re paying attention in a way almost no one else is. And we’re also building little stories, right? This happened because of this.” He’s just described plot. But obviously there’s a problem with this, right? Right off the bat, Janice is “unsure of everything. These guys, all of them, they lied recreationally, professionally, to stay sharp, to stay alive. Habituated to misdirection and subterfuge . . . it got to the point where Janice couldn’t expect an honest answer if she asked about the weather.” Do you, as a novelist, feel like you’ve just described the hazards of your own profession? Another way of asking this might be: what attracts you to cops—to undercover cops—as characters?

MB: In the scene you’re talking about, Tevis goes on to make the argument that we get into trouble when we assume the narrative is reality, that because a chain of causality has been established this particular story is not only true but the only possible truth. Specifically he’s talking about two gangbangers dressed crisply all in white. He convinces himself that if they had violence on the brain, if they thought they might get bloody tonight, they would’ve worn different clothes. But guess what? They’ve got violence on the brain.

I don’t think I’m describing the hazards of novel-writing here but rather the responsibility of the novelist: to complicate the narrative, to establish more nuance than we’re currently seeing in tabloids, Crossfire debate shows, criminal trials, Internet comments sections, etc.

I’m attracted to undercovers because they are so complicated. They’re living so many different lives simultaneously. I heard a story about an undercover unit that had three separate Christmas parties, one for wives, one for girlfriends, and one for the backup girlfriends. That must be exhausting! Is that kind of deception a byproduct of the job, or did they get the job in the first place because they were already comfortable with deception? A little of both probably. The gap that all of us frequently have between what we’re thinking and what we’re doing is exaggerated with undercovers, and fiction—with its access to interiority—is particularly good at exploring that gap. As readers we tend to bond very easily to characters when we know secrets about them that no one else knows. Spy fiction gets so much mileage out of the juxtaposition between what is said and what is thought, as do books like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. My all-time favorite sentence is from P.G. Wodehouse, when Bertie Wooster cheerily says goodbye to a character he doesn’t particularly like: ‘’Tinkerty-tonk,’ I said, and I meant it to sting.”

Plus undercovers are great talkers—their job requires that they convince strangers to commit felonies on their behalf—and you can probably never go wrong stuffing your book full of great talkers.

ER: Did you listen to Serial? What did you think of they way that story was told?

MB: Of course I listened to Serial. I listened to the podcasts about Serial, poured over the Reddit forums, and worked myself into a tizzy of delighted obsession. The whole thing was obviously in my wheelhouse—crime, young people, an urban environment—but it turns out it was in a lot of people’s wheelhouses, and as a storyteller who wants to engage a mass audience I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to take some lessons from its approach, if only to justify the amount of time I spent thinking about it.

Vis-à-vis my own biases and narcissism, I had convinced myself fairly early on that I more or less knew what had actually happened, who had committed the murder, and I glommed onto the evidence that supported my theory and dismissed anything that didn’t. That’s going to happen, of course, but I loved the way Sarah Koenig kept calling me out on it by calling herself out on it. She presented herself as a perfect proxy for the reader (the listener?) in that she had all the same questions, doubts, and frustrations that we did. A protagonist that wants exactly what we want makes for a powerful narrative experience. That’s one of the fundamental pleasures of detective stories. Unlike most detective stories, however, Serial resisted definitive resolution. But I never felt cheated because the show was a powerful and convincing indictment not only against the criminal justice system but against the kinds of stories Tevis was complaining about in your previous questions, stories in which one particular narrative is presented as THE narrative.

Of course I’m talking about all this as if Serial were a novel, and Koenig a Dr. Watson figure. A criticism levied against the show that I find persuasive is that we never got to know much about the victim. There were logistical constraints there: apparently and understandably her family didn’t want to talk to Koenig about it. But the more we might know about Hae Min Lee, the more we’d be reminded that there’s a real dead girl at the heart of this story that we are so happily downloading. But I love that Serial got me to think about the ethics of all this; I love the space it took up in my head.

But now I feel like I need to flush it out of my system, like cocaine. After listening to the last episode—which I loved—I deleted the podcast from my phone. I haven’t even read the interview with Jay. I’m sure I’ll approach season 2 with dread, afraid that I might end up a twitching addicted mess again, or worse, disappointed.

ER: I’ve been walking around telling everyone about this book, and I’ve been describing it as a harrowing and funny cop book, but I heard you recently tell someone that you don’t write about cops, you write about jobs. And the surprise I felt in hearing that was sort of like: ah, of course. One of the things that gives the book its warmth and its humor is the stuff that happens off the streets, in the rumpus (headquarters). This is a work novel—and like Then We Came To An End, or the television show The Office, a lot of the stuff these guys have to do just to get through a day is soul-crushing busy-work. The copy machine doesn’t work, there are quotas to meet, a buy-board goes up on the wall, pranks pulled out of boredom, the constant worry about being fired. Obviously, a lot of the work takes place outside of the rumpus as well, where the stakes for the undercovers are extraordinarily high, but the pressure in this book is bureaucratic, and it’s what drives Janice to act in ways she might not be proud of. At what point this pressure enter the book? Did you always know you were writing about work, or did it occur to you a little way in?

MB: I’m very lucky to work with Bill Thomas, who’s my editor at Doubleday, and worked with me on my first book. When my agent and I were trying to sell Uncle Janice, I sent in about 80 pages, everything I had written, along with a summarized outline of the rest of the novel. The outline was full of dirty cops, dead bodies, and double crosses, some real plot-heavy stuff. Bill said he loved the pages but hated the outline. The book I was writing, he told me, was about work—directly in the vein of The Office and Then We Came to the End—and not about all the other theatrics in my outline. And that’s some old school, Golden Age editing right there: helping me to identify the book that I wanted to write.

ER: This book, like your first book Dogfight, is set in Queens, where you grew up. Now you live in Minneapolis. What does that distance meant to you, as a writer?

MB: I don’t know. I used to say that my homesickness kept me chained to my desk, that it gave me an opportunity to visit Queens without paying for plane tickets. Now it’s the pleasure of writing that keeps me chained to my desk. Joyce wrote about Dublin from Switzerland, Richard Price writes about New York from New York. It’s whatever works and right now writing about Queens from Minneapolis is keeping me happy.

ER: Are there any books or authors whose work has shaped your style in a meaningful way? I feel like every author always has one specific book in mind when they are writing, that it’s that book that is, in some ways, the audience you are trying to impress, or engage, or show up, or re-imagine.

MB: At the start of any project, I actually think about a stack of books—all very different from one another—that I’m trying to squeeze down into one book, which is the novel I want to publish. Of course once the actual writing starts, the book morphs into a beast of its own. But the books in that stack are never my audience. With Uncle Janice, the audience I’m trying to impress and engage are the people of Queens, specifically undercover cops in Queens, people who might not ever read the book, but I’m hoping that by addressing them directly I might somehow tell a story that anyone might want to read. In fiction, specificity seems to be the route to universality. Sometimes you got to go small to get big.

Matt Burgess is the critically acclaimed author of Dogfight, A Love Story. A graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, he grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. He teaches creative writing at Trinity College, in Hartford, CT.

It may surprise you, as it did us, to learn that we citizens of the United States have not yet built ourselves a museum to honor our great writers. Luckily, The American Writers Museum aims to do just that in Chicago in 2016. In the meantime, artist Mia Funk is tasked with creating a group portrait of America’s finest authors. In this ongoing series, she presents her preliminary sketches, along with thoughts on, interviews with, and histories of her subjects. This week, she sketches and interviews Joyce Carol Oates.

To be an observer as transparent as a glass of water is a haunting metaphor. It is also, perhaps intentionally, something of a contradiction, considering the person who said it has published over 70 books. Those publishing cycles are those of someone fully comfortable with dipping into her subconscious and sharing what she finds there. The opposite of safe. The opposite of invisible.

In that way, Oates almost resembles Bob Dylan, that other poet of American life whose output astonishes and whose song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was the inspiration for her much anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” She seems to have embraced the same down-to-earth don’t think twice philosophy about producing work and moving on. Not so much a Mike Tyson (the boxer she has written extensively about) but a literary Manny Pacquiao; a fighter who has moved effortlessly between different weight divisions and is known for his fast combinations and not being afraid to rise up and stretch himself even at the risk of leaving himself wide open. Oates taught James Joyce’s writing at Princeton and also seems to share his intellectual curiosity for things high and low. When people from Dublin visited the Irish writer in Paris, he’s said not to have been interested in talking about literary theory, but quizzing them about all the little changes to his hometown since he’d left it. Oates also has this openness to learning from everything around her; her reputation for listening to students and helping them discover their style; her engagement with Twitter; the multiplicity of voices in her collected works. Joyce once said of Ulysses that he had put in it “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”

Oates is just such a living puzzle: A funny and soft-spoken writer who often writes about violent extremes. A generous teacher who finds time to be one of our most prolific writers. (She made time for this interview during her transition to Stanford, that’s how giving she is.) Born on a farm in upstate New York, she began her education in a one-room schoolhouse and has now spent over half a century teaching at the highest level. Though some of her books seem designed to shock (Rape, A Love Story indeed contains a love story and not at all the one suggested by the title, and Blonde is not all glamor and Hollywood but an interior portrait of Norma Jean Baker) there is a subtly positive undertow to all this conflict in some of her stories about survivors, which is more evident in her fiction for young adults.

In addition to publishing under her own name, she’s written mystery novels under the names Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, but the person she resembles most, of course, is herself. The most-visible invisible woman. Oates. Teacher. Novelist. Memoirist. Poet. Essayist. Short Story Writer . . . We will be talking about her for generations to come.

—Mia Funk

Mia Funk: If I were to go into your online browsing history, what would I find?

Joyce Carol Oates: A hodgepodge of many things, I’m sure.

MF: It’s said you never have writers block. So what feeds your imagination? What gets you going writing in the morning?

JCO: Though I am never exactly “blocked” I do have difficult periods. I am led by a fascination with material—the challenge of presenting it in an original & engaging way. I have no problem imagining stories, characters, distinctive settings & themes– but the difficulty is choosing a voice & a language in which to present it.

MF: Which books of yours came to you naturally? And why?

JCO: “Naturally”?—none.

MF: Which ones were more of a struggle?

JCO:Blonde, which is my longest novel, was a considerable struggle simply because of its length & complexity. It is a “fictional biography” of Norma Jeane Baker, who becomes “Marilyn Monroe” encased in a sort of American postmodernist epic.

MF: What do you find most challenging to write?

JCO: The novel is the most challenging form if you are trying to create something original. Obviously, all genres can be written “to form” . . .

MF: When you are creating characters, do they already have a strong presence in your mind’s eye?

JCO: Characters begin as voices, then gain presence by being viewed in others’ eyes. Characters define one another in dramatic contexts. It is often very exciting, when characters meet—out of their encounters, unanticipated stories can spring.

MF: You’re a writer who has so many ideas. Do your ideas ever keep you up at night?

JCO: But I really concentrate on just one work at a time. (At the present time, a novel told from several perspectives, so that the tone of the chapters changes considerably from person to person.)

MF: You’ve said the idea for Mudwoman stemmed from a dream. Do your novels often come to you that way, as a pure image?

JCO: It is very rare for me to get such a powerful idea from a dream. I wish it happened more often—it is quite magical, challenging, unsettling—though it is also a good deal of work, the attempt to contextualize the image and give it a plausible presence in the world.

MF: Is it too much to ask . . . what was the last dramatic dream you had?

JCO: Dreams are intensely emotional & “retelling” them is misleading.

MF: What elements have to be in place for you to commit to a writing project? What convinces you that an idea is strong enough to work as a book? What questions do you ask yourself?

JCO: Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects—which perhaps, one day, I will develop.

MF: Have there been times when all the elements have been in place, but the writing itself proved challenging?

JCO: Yes, usually this is the case, in the first several weeks especially.

MF: How do you think the experience of being born on a farm influenced your work?

JCO: Yes, there is something very special about living in the country, the fact of solitude, being able to spend much time alone—though cities are fascinating & filled with vitality & diversity, the country seems to provide a deeper sort of solicitude for the soul.

MF: What was one of your most significant memories of that time in your life?

JCO: I’ve written about my childhood & girlhood in a memoir titled The Lost Landscape , which Ecco will publish in fall 2015. All of my memories of those years seem about equal . . . though I have one chapter that is narrated from the perspective of my pet chicken, Happy Chicken, when I was about five or six years old.

MF: You’ve spoken of your upbringing, the importance of discipline and the encouragement your family gave you as a writer. What about the way they expressed themselves? Do you find echoes of it in your writing voice?

JCO: Yes, my parents’ voices do emerge from time to time in my writing. My father was particularly funny, had a sharp wit & sense of humor, & I am often drawn to presenting such men in my fiction, an unusual blend of the sardonic & the tender.

MF: Because of the subject matter of your books I feel I have to ask . . . what was your first exposure to death?

JCO: My first exposure to death was the abrupt, unexpected death of my grandfather when I was a young girl.

MF: You have spoken before of the effect receiving the book Alice in Wonderland as a young girl had on you. Which edition of the book did you have? Did the illustrations in it affect your reading of the book?

MF: What places and symbols reoccur most in your work? And what do you feel draws you back to them?

JCO: The landscape of upstate New York, including the Adirondacks, is haunting to me; I have set many of my short stories & novels there. Obviously, it is the place of childhood, that exerts a powerful spell over us through our lives.

MF: You have spoken of crime as being a metaphor of society and the country in which we live. As our society has changed, how has the way you’ve written about crime and violence changed over time? Are your concerns different than they were at the beginning?

JCO: Writers evolve in ways not always obvious to them. I don’t write about crime per se—I never have—but about individuals who may have encountered “crime”—violent domestic incidents, in particular—that has affected their lives.

MF: You’ve written family sagas, suspense novels and books for young people. You’ve written about Mike Tyson and Marilyn Monroe. That’s an extraordinary range. So what draws you to these subjects who on the surface don’t seem to have much in common? And can you share with us a little of your process of getting in character when the character you are writing about has life experiences which are vastly different from your own?

JCO: Really impossible to answer! I write about what excites & interests me.

MF: What’s striking about your writing is how you take gritty situations and damaged characters but somehow through your prose manage to give them a state a grace. Is there something about these contrasts which attracts you?

JCO: We all inhabit interior landscapes & these are mediated to us through language. It might be said that we are the thoughts we are thinking. What engages the writer/ poet is the individual’s response to the “situation”—what she or he makes of it. That is the essence of the human drama, & why imaginative literature is so much deeper, more intense, & more memorable than objective history with its impersonal perspective.

MF: It seems you’ve found the perfect balance between your writing, teaching and private life. Can you think of any particular moments where you have lost touch with the experience of life, with certain people around you, because you were so busy writing? If so, how did you manage to maintain this balance?

JCO: I have always had a job, & so I have never experienced a time in my life when I was not connected to others. I’ve been teaching—at one or another university, predominantly Princeton—(but right now I am Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford)—since the age of 22.

MF: In Blonde you wrote: “If there was music in this scene it would be a quick staccato music.” Music also features strongly in We Were the Mulvaneys and many of your novels. So is music important to your creative process?

JCO: Over all, probably not. But I feel that there is an appropriate, essential music beneath some scenes . . .

MF: I read that you sometimes like to draw. What was the last museum exhibit you enjoyed? Whose paintings do you admire and why?

JCO: This would take hours to answer adequately! I admire much of art. Last museum? One of the Picasso exhibits in NYC at a gallery.

MF: Recently Princeton University held a retirement gala in your honor during which your former creative writing students paid tribute to you. So many of your students, now published authors, mention the inspiration and sense of self you gave them, describing your classes as life-changing.

What do you think being a teacher has given you? What do you feel being a teacher has taught you about writing?

JCO: This is too vast to answer . . .

MF: You have written about being an observer, at times feeling invisible? Is that feeling still true today?

JCO: It is much better for the writer to be an observer than a participant, at least in situations about which he/ she hopes to write.

MF: You’ve talked about an early displacement in your mother’s life, how it opened up a different life for her, but also set up a kind of mystery about the life she might have led . . . What would you say was your most significant displacement? And how did it inspire you?

JCO: My most significant displacement of recent years—or rather, of my life, I suppose—was the sudden death in February 2008 of my husband of forty-six years Raymond Smith. But it is still too profound a loss really to define except at length . . . one never comes to the end of accessing such losses, I suppose. It is like some sort of deep wound that somehow is not lethal, over which a thick scar tissue eventually grows. It is always there, but you persevere.

MF: What do you feel about the expression Women’s Writing?

JCO: It does seem patronizing, since there is no Men’s Writing. But perhaps some attention is better than none. I am undecided– attitudes toward this subject have evolved over the years & are not fully defined even now.

MF: Which books of yours would you recommend to readers just coming to your work? And if you could condense the message of everything you’ve written into a few lines, what realizations or feelings would you like to leave your readers with?

JCO: My work is various, & so if a reader prefers a long novel, or a novella, or a story collection—that would determine a choice. Blonde is a novel of mine people often mention, but it is quite long, & ambitious; it is a postmodernist experiment of a sort, mediated by a (posthumous) Norma Jeane Baker. Zombie is a short novel narrated by a psychopathic serial killer—it is certainly not for everyone. Missing Mom is a novel written in a non-literary, readily accessible voice—it was imagined as a novel that my own mother might have read & enjoyed. (It is, in fact, a novel in homage to my mother Carolina Oates.) The stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep take up relationships of individuals—grandson/grandmother; lovers; wives & husbands; daughter, father & father’s fiancee; young woman interviewer interviewing elderly Robert Frost. If the reader is interested in memoir of loss, A Widow’s Story would be appropriate. (In fall 2015 The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age, which focuses on my childhood & girlhood in rural upstate New York, will be published.)

What a brilliant idea, to establish an American Writers Museum! It is very fitting that this ambitious museum is Midwestern in its setting, and particularly in the great literary city of Chicago. Here is a project that will be both educational and thrilling, inspiring to all who love to read and to write. I am honored to be involved in this original enterprise and will be very intrigued by its development and the ways in which it will flourish.

– Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She published her first book in 1963 and has since published over forty novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction

Mia Funk is an artist and writer who teaches at the École de Dessin Technique et Artistique, Paris. Her work has received many awards & nominations, including a Prix de Peinture (Salon d’Automne de Paris), Thames & Hudson Pictureworks Prize, Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, KWS Hilary Mantel Short Story Prize, Doris Gooderson Prize, Momaya Prize & Celeste Prize. Her paintings have been shown at the Grand Palais and are held in several public collections, including the Dublin Writers Museum. She is currently working on portraits for the American Writers Museum, completing a novel and a collection of linked short stories. Catch her on Twitter: @miafunk.

]]>http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/38539/a-portrait-of-the-writer-an-interview-with-joyce-carol-oates.html/feed2The Boatmaker: An Interview with John Benditthttp://www.tinhouse.com/blog/37877/an-interview-with-john-benditt-author-of-the-boatmaker.html
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/37877/an-interview-with-john-benditt-author-of-the-boatmaker.html#commentsMon, 02 Feb 2015 15:00:21 +0000http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/?p=37877A fierce and complicated man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the isolated island where he was born. Encountering the wider world for the first time, the reluctant hero falls into a destructive love affair, is swept up into a fanatical religious movement, and finds himself a witness to racial hatred unlike anything he’s ever known. The boatmaker is tempted, beaten, and betrayed: his journey marked by chilling episodes of violence and horror while he struggles to summon the strength to make his own way.

Out this week from Tin House Books, John Benditt’s The Boatmaker is a fable for our times, a passionate love story, and an odyssey of self-discovery.

We sat down with the author to discuss the inspiration and influences that preceded his novel.

Tin House: How did this novel begin? What was the impetus for writing it?

John Benditt: The Boatmaker actually grew out of a short story I wrote for a writing workshop I was taking in New York. At the time I thought I was writing a collection of short stories. This one—which was about the boatmaker on Small Island—felt different from and better than the others. The response from the folks in the workshop seemed to confirm that. I was pleased, but I thought that was all there was to it. I put the story in the collection. A little while later I had an idea for another story about the same boatmaker—this one set on Big Island. Then I thought I was really done with him. But he wasn’t done with me: I began envisioning bits and pieces of things that happened to him on the Mainland.

TH: What sorts of works inspired it?

JB: I think one of the important things about The Boatmaker is its tone. That tone comes from some things that influenced me a long time ago. And not all of them are novels. In fact, of the three that come to mind, none of them is a novel. One is the writing of Robert Creeley, whose poetry I loved beyond all others when I was about nineteen or twenty. A few years later, two other works, again neither a novel, had a big influence on me—and I think their tone resurfaced in The Boatmaker. One is an album by Neil Young called After the Gold Rush. The other is the film McCabe and Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman.

TH: The Boatmaker is an expansive work, covering an array of themes: religion, imperialism, industrialism, self-discovery, cults, love. Is there one theme that you feel defines the core of the book?

JB: In my opinion the one theme that connects all the others is that of becoming who you really are. After all, a drunken carpenter from a little island at the end of the world would seem an unlikely person to have a large and unusual destiny. And probably most worldly and experienced observers would have predicted, if they had seen him before he sailed away from Small Island, that he would wind up right where he was born as a sad old drunk who had once been a wonderful worker in wood. But something in the boatmaker pushes him out into the wider world in search of something. And although he makes some large and very painful mistakes along the way, he never gives up. I think that process is at the core of the book.

TH: You have had a career as a science journalist and editor. How did your science writing influence your fiction writing? Has your background been a significant influence on this book?

JB: Although as an editor I edited stories on a huge range of topics, the two areas I was most interested in personally were biology and social science. I was always interested in how things are interconnected—which is the essence of a society or a species—and in how the present is layered over the past. The field that combines those things in the most concrete way is probably archaeology, and for a time I was the editor at Scientific American who handled all the major, scientist-written articles on archaeology. I loved that. And I think you can see some of that in the novel: the interconnection of apparently disparate things and the way the past still exists, many layers deep, in us as individuals and in our society.

TH: The boatmaker’s story is not set in a specific time or place and yet it is clearly based on the history of European Jews. Did you do much research for the book?

JB: I didn’t do any research in the explicit sense for the book. But I do think that I have always read in a certain way that reflects my upbringing as a Jew, albeit a pretty secular one. For example, I read Proust to some extent as the experience of someone who is privileged and aristocratic, but also aware that he is in some way Jewish and therefore vulnerable. I’m sure Proust would have denied that he was a Jew, but I think he was deeply aware of his mother’s Jewishness in a way that made him both sensitive and vulnerable. In that he was not unlike Jacob and Rachel Lippsted—an aristocratic brother and sister the boatmaker encounters on the Mainland. So I read through Jewish eyes, as it were. At the same time, I have often been drawn to the idea of becoming a priest. Perhaps this is a bit contradictory.

TH: The lack of specific details that would identify a time period and setting gives the book an episodic and fable-like tone. Was it your intention to write the book this way?

JB: Yes and no. On the one hand, as I mentioned, I didn’t know for quite some time that I was writing a novel, so I didn’t have a plan—for the tone, the story or the characters—that would make up the novel in its final form. On the other hand, even in that original short story I mentioned, one of the things I liked was the fact that while things on Small Island were quite concrete—the sea was cold, people were grimy, men got drunk and stabbed each other in the bars in Harbortown and when they did, they bled into the sawdust on the floor—at the same time it wasn’t an identifiable place or time. I liked that and that did remain from the original short story.

TH: What are you working on now?

JB: I’m working on a collection of short stories. They’re connected, but they all stand alone.

John Benditt had a distinguished career as a science journalist. He was an editor at Scientific American and at Science before serving as editor in chief of Technology Review. The Boatmaker is his debut novel.

Earlier today, we featured an interview with Dr. Malcolm E. O’Hagan, President of the American Writers Museum. In anticipation of the 2016 launch of that institution, artist Mia Funk has been tasked with creating a group portrait of great American writers. Starting next week on The Open Bar, Mia will share her sketches and inspirations with us in a new column, Portrait of the Writer.

The series will start February 10th with Mia’s portrait of and interview with Joyce Carol Oates. We talked with Mia via email about the process of creating portraits of these literary giants.

Tin House: How did the Portrait of the Writer idea come about?

Mia Funk: Since last year I’ve been talking with Dr. Malcolm O’Hagan about doing the group portraits for the American Writers Museum. I have just sent in an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which will help determine the scale and the number of writers we may include in the eventual portraits.

In the meantime, I wanted to do something which felt more personal. It goes back to things Malcolm was saying about foregrounding and selecting writers from such a vast pool. It’s difficult to narrow the list and I thought sharing my sketchbooks with readers of Tin House would be a way to feature individual writers and explore themes in their work before approaching the final painting.

I still wasn’t sure what to call this series of sketches. I’d thought about Do You See What I’m Hearing? in reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, I decided on Portrait of the Writer.

TH: In a lot of the sketches, you seem to be working from quotes. Is there something about the specificity of language that gets you closer to these writers than you can via biographical details?

MF: Specificity is a good word because an artwork is not dissimilar to a poem or story or other short forms. I began to think about metaphors themselves, how they’re used to tap into our collective unconscious and also awaken our capacity to remember, create and dream. How sometimes language weighs more on our lives than the real world.

It’s not possible to cram in all the biographical details so you have to make choices. I try to give a short understanding of something essential and for that I look to a writer’s own words. I feel that gets you closer. Opens a door on their perception. You don’t need to draw the four corners to feel you have been in a room.

While there’s lots of interesting quotes, they don’t all spark imagery. So I spend a long time searching for a line which captures something essential about a writer’s life and work. I’m looking for quotes which evoke an image, but also set up a curiosity and mystery and leads you back to their writing.

TH: It’s easy to forget that metaphor is such a basic building block for us. In the way we talk, write, and even see, we often start out with an image, and then through metaphor, we start to describe it and define it. Do you feel like painting these portraits is the opposite of that, or just another step in the same direction?

MF: Language. Image. Music . . . it’s all a kind of storytelling. For me the different art forms don’t oppose each other, but run on parallel tracks. I feel originality happens in the synesthetic moments when different senses converge.

I thought there was potential to find added beauty in certain things a writer said by translating it back into image. When Joyce Carol Oates said she sometimes feels as transparent as a glass of water. I thought, what a lovely image. I will paint her as a glass of water. For me there is a real satisfaction in attempting to turn a metaphor into something more concrete.

We all speak imagistically, only sometimes we are so bombarded by images and language that we forget. We become blinded by sensory overload. I think that’s the point of all art: to take something we are all familiar with and make us look, hear, feel it again as though for the first time.

TH: Why did you decide to make these portraits of the writers, rather than, say, illustrations of the quotes you’ve chosen or their bodies of work?

MF: All faces tell stories, but the faces of writers who spend long periods alone and looking inwards, are particularly interesting and challenging to paint. And that’s what the American Writers Museum were interested in. I will be trying to put echoes of their work within the group portraits. Along the bottom of this watercolor of Maya Angelou you can see flying debris from a dark hurricane which funnels up into a storm of blue butterflies. Just the memory of a cage. I hope this captures something of the spirit of resilience readers find in her writing; out of all the pain and experiences comes something of beauty.

One of the challenges of capturing a writer’s personality is, of course, that they don’t have just one. Also, many writers aren’t terribly interested in what they wear. It’s not about the outward appearance but making a continual journey inwards. Traditional portraiture involves external symbolism, jewellery and other accessories which point towards the subject’s standing in life, and clothing allows artists an opportunity to show off their skills in reproducing details, but to focus on the external somehow seemed wrong when portraying writers, who aren’t just the faces they represent to the world, but a collection of all the characters they’ve realized and all the stories they’ve told.

Joyce Carol Oates said it more succinctly in her interview, “We all inhabit interior landscapes and these are mediated to us through language.”

TH: You recently mentioned to me a Kierkegaard quote you’d discovered via the American writer David Milch: “The self rests transparently in the spirit that gave it rise.” In a lot of your work, both for The American Writers Museum and otherwise, there’s a very affecting sense of transparency, layers of underpainting that leave the feeling of hazy memory or a partially obscured timeline. Is there a relationship there to narrative, to the obscuring and excavating work writers do?

MF: Yes, well, I’m very interested in those themes that occupy writers: childhood, memory, looking back and the search for lost time. I like to think of my paintings as stories that aren’t quite complete but complete in the mind of the viewer. The quality of the best stories is that they do not leave everything resolved, but suggest a scene which is about to take place but we never see.

TH: So how big will this group portrait be? The hardest part must just be narrowing down the writers who will appear.

MF: That is one of the things still being decided. One idea is that it may need to be a triptych. Of course, it is not possible to contain the richness of American literary history in a single painting. For that, you really need to go back to the individual books, but what I hope to do is hint at its immensity. If a painting could be part of young reader’s first introduction to Faulkner or Hemingway, James Baldwin or Flannery O’Connor or Mark Twain, pointing them to read their works, that would be wonderful.

I am delighted to be doing these paintings for the American Writers Museum and to be involved in such an educational endeavor. And I’m really excited to be doing this series of interviews and artworks for Tin House which allows me to approach portraiture in a new way.

Mia Funk is an artist and writer who teaches at the École de Dessin Technique et Artistique, Paris. Her work has received many awards & nominations, including a Prix de Peinture (Salon d’Automne de Paris), Thames & Hudson Pictureworks Prize, Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, KWS Hilary Mantel Short Story Prize, Doris Gooderson Prize, Momaya Prize & Celeste Prize. Her paintings have been shown at the Grand Palais and are held in several public collections, including the Dublin Writers Museum. She is currently completing a novel and a collection of linked short stories. Catch her on Twitter: @miafunk.

It may come as a surprise to you—it certainly did to us—but there is as yet no museum dedicated to writers in the United States. If all goes according to the plan of the board of The American Writers Museum, that will change by late 2016. In advance of the AWM opening in Chicago, artist Mia Funk has been tasked to create a group portrait of great American writers. In a new feature on The Open Bar, Mia will showcase her sketches of American writers young and old. Our interview with Mia about that process will appear later today.

In the meantime, Mia spoke with the President of the American Writers Museum, Malcolm O’Hagan, about the inspiration for the museum.

Mia Funk: Where did the idea for the American Writers Museum come from? How did your journey begin?

Dr. Malcolm E. O’Hagan: After visiting the Dublin Writers Museum I sought out the American counterpart and was surprised to learn that there is no national institution that celebrates the lives of the great American writers. The journey began after I discussed the concept of an American Writers Museum with a number of influential people in the literary community and received enthusiastic and unanimous encouragement to pursue the idea.

MF: How long has it been in the planning?

MO: The American Writers Museum Foundation was incorporated in 2010. Planning in earnest began late in 2010.

MF: Why an American Writers Museum? What do you feel makes this project so vitally important?

MO: Writers have a profound impact on our thinking. They influence our history, our culture, our daily lives. They reveal to us who we are. They educate and entertain us. Their works are the keystone of our cultural heritage. It is vitally important for young people to understand the role writers play in society. It is particularly so at a time when reading and writing are being so impacted by technology. I would love to see a day when people have the same reverence for great writers as they do for sports heroes and film stars.

MF: I noticed you titled the layout for the museum your First Edition Concept Plan. That’s interesting. It suggests that creating and laying out the different exhibitions resembles the process of planning a novel. So, how many different drafts did you go through?

MO: We are on our third draft of the Museum Concept. The First Draft envisions the ultimate museum as a large institution comparable to an art museum housed in an iconic building. The Second Draft, and the Third one that we are currently working on, focus on the first phase of the museum which will be housed in a building in Downtown Chicago. This is what we refer to as the “First Edition”. At the outset we received prudent advice to develop the museum in stages, as has been typical for many cultural institutions.

MF: Have there been many difficult decisions in terms of choosing one writer’s works over another?

MO: Choices are always difficult. The authors featured in the concept plans are strictly illustrative. We now have several curatorial teams at work deciding which authors and works to feature in the various galleries in the First Edition. A key feature of the American Writers Museum will be its ability to feature many authors and works through changing exhibits. The museum will be theme based, and the exhibits will be designed in a way that will allow us to show how different authors addressed these themes over time.

MF: But what’s wonderful about the museum is that it will be a never-ending story that evolves over time. I like the whole interactive principal and the central museum tables which will allow visitors to ask questions and post quotes. I think it really reflects the way we read today. It’s not a passive experience.

MO: I am glad that we are developing the museum now and not 30 years ago. The whole concept of what a museum should offer to visitors has changed, and the technology is now available to engage visitors in totally new interactive ways. The ability to “do” something as opposed to just “looking” greatly enriches the visitor experience. And the new technology makes it easy to change content, to pose new questions, to feature different works, to tell different stories.

MF: Anyone I’ve mentioned the museum to has said what a wonderful idea it is and are sort of puzzled why a museum like this doesn’t already exist. It does seem absurd that America has so many museums devoted to fine art–an activity which really doesn’t touch a lot of people’s lives–but in a country composed of so many immigrants and children of immigrants, where stories have played such a part in remembering our pasts and unifying us, that it has taken us so long to honor our writers collectively.

MO: I was amazed too when I found that we do not have a museum dedicated to American Literature. But happily that is about to change. We have so many wonderful stories to tell. We are a species of story tellers.

MF: I can only imagine to get the ball rolling on this project––with your background in manufacturing and engineering*––you must have realised what a massive undertaking it was. What kind of surprises have you met along the way?

MO: When I embarked upon this mission I made a ten year commitment. Nothing worth doing is easy if you want to do it right. I am experienced enough to know that things generally take much longer than we would like, and that the task is more difficult than anticipated.

MF: Can you tell us a little about the key permanent exhibits?

MO: The structure and themes of the museum will be fixed, but much of the content will change in order to allow us to feature a wide range of authors and writings. The Main Hall will serve as a “Hall of Fame”. As you would expect, it will feature the canonical and award winning writers. Shaping America will feature the writings that have molded our history and culture and continue to do so. Creating an American Literature will feature writers who broke with European literary traditions to create an “American” voice. We Will Be Heard will feature minority and immigrant writers who had to fight to get their story heard. Of course there will be areas where the different themes converge and build on each other. The other galleries are self evident. I would like to emphasize the American Writers Museum will be “Story Telling” institution where artifacts will play a much smaller role than in a traditional museum.

MF: Presently, what are the museum’s current goals? For example, do you have a dream exhibit?

MO: The whole museum is a dream.

MF: In terms of upcoming acquisitions, which archives or manuscripts is the museum seeking to acquire?

MO: At the outset we set a policy that the AWM will not duplicate what others are already doing effectively. Nor do we want to compete unnecessarily with other literary institutions. Consequently we do not envision the AWM as a research institution, as an archival institution, as a collections based institution or as an award making institution since all of these functions are already being performed admirably by others. The AWM will be the “Presentation” arm of the literary community.

MF: Can you describe some of the programs/exhibitions you’ll have for young people?

MO: One of the galleries is the Children’s Room which will be fun and engaging. While the AWM will sponsor extensive programming, the details have not yet been developed. We have a small exhibit featuring four Chicago authors – Brooks, Hansberry, Terkel and Wright – traveling to many neighborhoods throughout Chicago.

MF: I see your Power of the Word online exhibition has reached out to readers, political leaders and writers asking them about their favorite books.

It’s particularly interesting the question you asked authors: “Which works by American writers should world leaders read to help them gain a better understanding of America?” Which works would you yourself recommend? And which works received the most recommendations?

MO: One book I would recommend to foreign leaders (and to everyone for that matter) is Lincoln at Gettysburg – The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills. This book tells us what America is all about.

MF: It’s interesting that a part of the museum will be devoted to political writing.

MO: We are a nation founded on political documents.

MF: You were born in Sligo, “Yeats Country”. And Ireland is also well known as a country of great writers. Was reading/storytelling a big part of your life growing up?

MO: Unfortunately I did not get to engage with literature until I went to college, and then to a very limited extent as I was an engineering student.

MF: Which books would you say most affected your thinking about the world?

MO: My thinking constantly evolves as I read new books. Isn’t that an important function of books!

MF: What do you feel books can do that no other medium can?

MO: For me books are a medium that allows me to concentrate and contemplate. I value the content and not the container, and I find a book to be a very friendly container.

MF: As consciousness evolves through our increasing dependence on devices, it seems now more than ever that novels, poetry, playwriting can provide a transcendent experience as counterpoint to all our daily distractions.

MO: I believe this to be true as it has been in the past.

MF: With more people being involved with video and blogging, there seems to be a rise in direct, less stylized forms of storytelling. Will there be exhibits in the museum devoted to oral storytelling? Screenwriting? Will the museum have exhibits addressing 21st century developments in narrative?

MO: Absolutely on all accounts. The museum has to be relevant and must stay so. I am happy to see the resurgence in oral story telling through recorded books which I listen to all the time. As a young lad I was enchanted by stories and plays on the radio. I would much prefer to hear a poet recite than to read the poem to myself. The AWM docents will be called “Story Tellers”.

MF: So what you’ve created seems to be much more than a museum. It’s actually a space geared to engage visitors’ creativity and imaginations.

For a long time people, including prominent writers like Philip Roth, have been predicting the end of the novel. What are your thoughts on that?

MO: How many times have we heard predictions of the end of the world!

Dr. Malcolm E. O’Hagan is retired from the National Electrical Manufacturers Association where he served as President and CEO from 1991 to 2006. He served on the Board of the National Association of Manufacturers and was Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Council of Manufacturing Associations. He is a past President of the Washington Industrial Roundtable. Malcolm served in the Carter and Reagan administrations as Executive Director of the U.S. Metric Board. Earlier in his career he held management positions at Bendix Corporation and the position of Senior Scientific Officer at the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards in Ireland. Malcolm was born in Ireland and raised in “Yeats Country” in County Sligo. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The National University of Ireland. He obtained his D.Sc. from The George Washington University in Washington D.C. which honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

Mia Funk is an artist and writer who teaches at the École de Dessin Technique et Artistique, Paris. Her work has received many awards & nominations, including a Prix de Peinture (Salon d’Automne de Paris), Thames & Hudson Pictureworks Prize, Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year, KWS Hilary Mantel Short Story Prize, Doris Gooderson Prize, Momaya Prize & Celeste Prize. Her paintings have been shown at the Grand Palais and are held in several public collections, including the Dublin Writers Museum. She is currently completing a novel and a collection of linked short stories. Catch her on Twitter: @miafunk.

In light of the announcement that Lacy M. Johnson’s The Other Side was selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, we decided to revisit an interview we conducted with her last year.

Tin House: The Suspect is still at large. How did this influence the writing of your memoir?

Lacy M. Johnson: I think the fact that he’s at large precipitated my choice not to use his name or anyone else’s name, though I might have made that choice even if he were in prison. The fact is, this isn’t just a memoir; it’s about my real actual life. And in my real actual life, there is a real actual person living abroad who might harm me or my family if he had the chance. I don’t use his actual name in real life. I don’t say it, and I don’t really like for other people to say it either. To protect the people I love, I tried to keep other people who appear in the memoir as anonymous as possible, while also writing in an accurate way about the relationship I have with those anonymous people.

At the same time, his at-largeness also affected the arc of the book. I think when most people think about a satisfying conclusion to a story like this, they might imagine him being brought to trial and convicted and sent to prison for decades. That isn’t possible in this case, since he’s a Venezuelan citizen and is protected from extradition by the Venezuelan government. He’ll never go to jail for this. He’ll never have to appear in court. He’ll never even be arrested. So that forced me to reimagine this notion of justice, and what it might look like in a story like mine.

TH: There are times you are willing to portray yourself in a less than flattering light and it doesn’t ever feel like you are courting the sympathy of your readers. Was this a conscious choice?

LMJ: I made a very conscious effort to portray events as I remember them: not as I wish they had been, or as they would be if life were made neat and tidy for the purposes of telling a story. Which meant I had to be honest, brutally honest, about who I am and the choices I made. I made some really bad choices, not least of which was the decision to begin a relationship with a man who was my Spanish teacher at the university, and who was twice my age. If I were interested in courting a reader’s sympathy, I could have made the case that he was a predator and I was his victim. It would have been an easy case to make. But the fact is, I had a lot of agency in the matter, and the very worst choice I ever made was to give it all away.

TH: The appendix is unexpectedly moving, as it shows the amount of research and reading you did on trauma before writing this book. Can you talk about how you started reading about trauma, and how that affected your approach to what happened, and how you wrote about it?

LMJ: It’s interesting that you say that, since the appendix as it appears in the book represents only a small fraction of the research I’ve conducted on this subject matter. The research itself began more than a decade ago when I was in graduate school and started teaching a poetry workshop in a shelter for women recovering from substance abuse. My faculty supervisor at the time directed me toward several volumes on recovery writing in an effort to prepare me to respond to the women’s writing in an effective and compassionate way, and this was actually a very instructive place to begin. For one thing, I discovered that I really, strongly objected to all of the rhetoric about how writing about trauma could, in effect, make a person “whole” again. It took years to articulate why this sentiment bothered me, but eventually I realized that it reinforces what I consider to be a flawed notion that after some kind of trauma (be it sexual violence or the death of a family member), that a person is somehow “broken.” After a trauma, a person may feel that some part of them has been shattered—that metaphor certainly describes the emotional state of a traumatized person—but the fact is, every person is already a whole person, has always been a whole person. Even if the trauma has profound psychological effects, a traumatized person is also always a whole person. The thought patterns change, as do behaviors and associations. And perhaps most difficult of all, what changes is the story that person tells about him- or herself, to him- or herself. Of course I didn’t know all of this, or couldn’t articulate all of this when I began the research, but over the years, my research has extended into medical journals and history books, Greek mythology and neuroscience, quantum physics and literature, and I think I can say now, with some degree of certainty, that the story I told myself about myself was what made me feel afraid for so many years. When I set out to write this book, it wasn’t to “fix” myself, or to make myself “whole” again, but to change that story I told myself about who I am, who I was, and who I still could be.

TH: Memory plays a huge role in your memoir. How do memories before your kidnapping—those from childhood and adolescence that are referenced—play a role in recovery?

LMJ: There’s a tendency, I think, among traumatized people to think of what came before the trauma (childhood and adolescence, for instance) as being a part of the “real” me, and the traumatic memory as something that “broke” me. But what I’ve come to realize is that the trauma, in my case having been kidnapped and raped by a man I once loved, is also the real me. Which is not to say it defines me, not any more than having grown up on a farm, or having gone to college at a state university, though in the past I tended to give it so much more weight and importance because I was so shocked and so blindsided by those events, and because they had such a lasting psychological impact. It felt as though the “real” me was gone, and what was left was a weaker, unstable, more frightened version of the person I had been. I didn’t like that feeling at all, and really wanted to change the way I thought. So, in the book, I also wrote about memories from my childhood and from adolescence because I thought that maybe if I treated the traumatic event as part of a much longer narrative that began long before I was kidnapped, and which had already continued long after I escaped, I might be able to put it in better perspective. For a very long time that traumatic memory had seemed like a static and unchangeable thing, so I thought that maybe if I could call a few things I remembered about that into question—as we do all the time with memories from our childhood and adolescence—I could make the traumatic memory more fluid, and let it return to the natural ebb and flow of memory. I wanted this story to become one of the stories I carry, instead of the story that I carry.

TH: Like your first memoir Trespasses, the title The Other Side implies crossing boundaries. What about this interests you?

LMJ: Trespasses is a book about geographic boundaries, cultural boundaries, class boundaries, and the boundaries created by the categories of gender and race, all of which begin with a single decision: to call this thing here different from that thing over there, and to assign value based on that difference. It seems that so many problems in the world come back to that same decision: to separate, to cleave, to pull one thing from another based on some perceived category of difference. The Other Side is a book about the boundary between the past and the present, the present and the future, and between the inner and outer self. I’m interested in these boundaries because it seems that, as a culture, we’re so invested them that we now treat them as natural, as fact. I’m very interested in challenging that.

TH:The Other Side is told in a series of vignettes, many no longer than a few pages. What appeals to you about this structure?

LMJ: From a very practical perspective, most of this book, as well as Trespasses, was written when my children were very small, and one block of text was all I could produce in the time it took for one of them to take a nap, or after they went to bed for the evening. So the vignettes are a logistical necessity.

At the same time, I don’t doubt that my use of the vignette has more than a little to do with the fact that I started out as a poet, and most of my formal training as a writer is in poetry. In the very, very beginning, I was writing these really tiny little poems, which only grew more and more dense and wrought over time. And then one day I realized how terrible and awful they were, and started writing prose poems instead. Trespasses, my first book, is a memoir in prose poems and short prose vignettes. The Other Side represents a slightly different point on that formal spectrum, since there aren’t any poems in the book, though I believe there is much poetry.

TH: Many of the events in your memoir you’ve never told your closest friends/colleagues. What are your feelings now that it is published and you are doing events and readings?

LMJ: Honestly, I feel completely terrified. I keep telling myself that no one will come to readings, that it will be published and no one will read it and then it will disappear. While I was writing it, I had to pretend that no one would ever read it or else the fear and the shame of it all would have been too overpowering and I would have given up. And my intention in writing it was never to write a popular book (though maybe in my wildest fantasies I got to talk to Oprah and Terry Gross); in fact, I started writing the book so I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to tell the story anymore. So I could, in effect, “come out” and stop telling it, or thinking of telling it, over and over again in this private way. Of course, the irony of the whole thing is that now that the book is out, I find myself having to tell and retell the story all the time. It still makes me uncomfortable, because people I work with ask what the book is about and I haven’t yet figured out an easy way to talk about it. Yes, it’s a book about this incredibly traumatic, unspeakably violent thing that happened many years ago, but more than that, I think, it’s a book about love. That’s hard to explain to someone who knows me only in a professional way, and it feels very risky, and very vulnerable. What I’m realizing in the process of having these really uncomfortable conversations, though, is that writing the book gave me an opportunity to reckon with these events in a very private way, and on a personal level, but talking about it in public requires that I begin a very different kind of process.

TH: This is a deeply personal story, but you are also clearly talking about a culture of violence, particularly against women. What do you hope you bring to the discussion?

LMJ: I don’t like throwing around the term “rape culture,” since I think a lot of people see a term like that and stop reading. But I’ll use it now because I think it’s necessary to answer your question: in a rape culture, it is taboo for women or men who have been raped to talk about having been raped. So much so that over half of all sexual assaults are not even reported to police. And then if they are reported, a woman gives her statement and then she is spoken for: by police officers or detectives or prosecutors or victims advocates. There’s so much shame and shaming associated with sexual violence, and they are all part of the same social structure, which permits only a single story to be told about power—about who has it, and who polices it. You know, we hear so often this old adage about how rape is mostly about power, which is not at all comforting to anyone who has been raped; and, at the same time, it also says something very disturbing about our culture when you consider that every two minutes someone in America is raped. In my experience, the violence itself is actually the point at which power ceases to be power and becomes merely force: the force of one body exerting its strength over another. But getting away with it reinforces that power. Shaming reinforces that power. The taboo of speaking about it reinforces that power. It’s possible, then, that part of what I hope to bring to the discussion about rape culture is a way to begin a discussion we’ve actually been avoiding for hundreds of years.

TH: How did you decide you were ready to not only write this book, but also to publish it?

LMJ: Ha! I still don’t think I’m ready! Who said anything about being ready?

Lacy M. Johnsonis the author of The Other Side and Trespasses: A Memoir, and she is co-artistic director of the location-based storytelling project [the invisible city]. She lives in Houston with her husband and children.